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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

Posted on 9 August 2015 by John Hartz

Contents: SkS Highlights, Celebrate!, Toon of the Week, Quote of the Week, He Said What?: Gov John Kasich, SkS Spotlights: Population Institute, Poster of the Week, Coming Soon on SkS, and 97 Hours of Consensus: Ove Hoegh-Guldberg

Toon of the Week

Quote of the Week

“California is burning,” he* said. “What the hell are you going to do about it?”

He stressed that he didn’t just mean this year’s terrible fire season, and he used the ravages of wildfires this season and in past seasons to make the case that climate change is both real and destructive.

“This is a wakeup call,” he said. “We have to start coming to our senses. This is not a game of politics. We need to limit our carbon pollution. These are real lives and real people. This problem cannot be solved year by year.

He Said What?

Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) is the rare GOP presidential candidate who has acknowledged that climate change is a real problem requiring us to “protect” the “creation that the Lord has given us.” But just days after earning plaudits for his relatively moderate-sounding approach in Thursday’s GOP presidential debate, Kasich adopted a climate-change denialist approach on Sunday.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd called Kasich one of the “big winners of Thursday’s debate,” and praised him for an “impressive performance for the supportive crowd” in his home state and read a Time magazine quote comparing him to Pope Francis.

Kasich distanced himself from the Pontiff on economic issues and environmental ones. “I think that man absolutely affects the environment, but as to whether, what the impact is… the overall impact — I think that’s a legitimate debate.”

He then added: “We don’t want to destroy people’s jobs, based on some theory that is not proven.”

There is no climate-change skepticism among scientists, though. John Cook, of the University of Queensland, reported in Environmental Research Letters that, after combing through thousands of research abstracts, his team found that 97 per cent endorsed the notion of human-driven climate change. Moreover, among the 10,000 scientists who had expressed a position on human-driven climate change in the peer-reviewed literature, 98.4 per cent endorsed the consensus, he told the Huffington Post.

SkS Spotlights: Population Institute

Vision

We envision a world where girls and women have achieved full gender equality; all women have access to reproductive health services, every child is a wanted child, and where global population is brought into balance with a healthy global environment and resource base.

Mission

Our mission is to improve the health and well-being of people and the planet by supporting policies and programs that promote sexual and reproductive health and rights. We build support for those policies and programs by educating policymakers, policy administrators, the media, and the general public about:

The essential importance of achieving gender equality and promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights;

The adverse impacts of overpopulation on the environment, scarce natural resources, biodiversity, and efforts to eliminate hunger and severe poverty in developing countries; and

The personal, social and economic benefits that arise from expanding access to family planning services and information.

97 Hours of Consensus: Ove Hoegh-Guldberg

"Despite the mounting evidence, there are still some who would deny the veracity of human-caused climate change and its potential to disrupt and harm our communities ... The latest [IPCC] report makes no bones about stating the consensus that human-driven climate change is occurring and it is important. Hundreds of changes have already been observed that are consistent with climate change, temperature rises (documented below), and associated issues such as ocean acidification."